Like I said - this shouldn't be attributed to Tesla as much as it can be attributed to battery advances. Tesla capitalised on it first and in the best way (with a luxury/aspiration car) and that's worth something for sure - but it's not like it made a breaktrough that would take others 10 years to figure out.

In fact "affordable" Teslas (model S) came after competition like Leaf which was a best seling electric car up until recently.

Sure, if you don't count the Chrysler TEVan, the Ford Ranger EV, the honda ev plus, the Toyota RAV4 EV...

also, if you ask me, a super expensive sports car should still count as a "gimmick". I give Tesla credit for reigniting excitement about EVs, but lets not oversell their achievement.

> Chrysler TEVa

The what?

> the Ford Ranger EV

The what?

> honda ev plus

The what?

> Toyota RAV4 EV

The what?

If you mention Tesla to literally anyone, they know about the cars. The product, and the marketing of it, have definitely brought EV's into the mainstream. Before that, very few consumers knew anything about EVs, maybe with the exception of the GM EV1. Now electric cars are a common sight on the road.

Back in the Tesla Roadster days it was basically something fans of supercars and a few geeks knew about.

Nisan Leaf was way more recognisable than a Tesla for a while.

And also things like Prius really prooved the point that electricity can be used to power cars.

Not knocking on Tesla, they have a great brand and helped spark interest and speed up demand for EVs. But saying they advanced the adoption of EVs by 10 years is ridiculous.

Honestly while I agree, I do think that Tesla did advance the adoption, purely by forcing it into the market so boldly with the model S. Other manufacturers were receiving government bailouts and messing around with smaller displacement city cars around 2010-2011, and brands like Karma started popping up along side Tesla and made a bit of disruptive noise to the big players.

I honestly don't think we'd have seen the same level of EV adoption by now if not for Tesla. But then I don't really know how to quantify it for arguments sake.

I don't think anyone denies Musk is a marketing genius.

Two of the best-selling electrical cars today either came out before Tesla had a mass-market car (Nissan Leaf, launched around the same time as an electric car) or are based on a platform that did (Renault Zoe; came out about the same time as the Model S, but its less successful sibling came out before the Model S).